Everything may be held against them

By Edward Copeland

Dubyaland is on an executive privilege frenzy as they now are invoking the right to keep their dirty laundry private to withhold records from congressional investigators looking into the friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman and the subsequent propaganda campaign use of his tragic death by claiming that certain papers relating to discussion of the friendly-fire shooting "implicate Executive Branch confidentiality interests."

Although Pentagon investigators determined quickly that he was killed by his own troops, five weeks passed before the circumstances of his death were made public. During that time, the Army claimed he was killed by enemy fire.

Tillman's family and others have said they believe the erroneous information peddled by the Pentagon was part of a deliberate cover-up that may have reached all the way to President Bush and then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. The committee said Friday it had scheduled a second hearing on Tillman's death for Aug. 1, this time to probe what senior Pentagon officials knew and when.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., agree that the documents that the White House have turned over are inadequate and provide little in the way of answers for their investigation.

The document production from the White House sheds virtually no light on these matters," Waxman and Davis wrote to White House counsel Fred Fielding, part of a renewed request for additional papers.

The White House claims that the only things they've withheld were internal matters not connected to Tillman, a bogus argument which doesn't fly with Waxman and Davis since one packet of documents consisted merely of newspaper clippings about Tillman's death and there were no records of how or when Donald Rumsfeld was even informed of the death.